Let the Waters Gather unto One Place (6)
After a dazzling rally—one that might more honestly have been called beach sepak takraw than beach volleyball—it was Ryuumai Fuu who finally seized the victory.
It had been a fierce, bruising fight. Where one of them pulled ahead, the other fell behind, each possessing some edge the other lacked; yet in the end, what split victory from defeat was the power transferred to her from that being beyond all specification, the one known as Behemoth.
"Tch. Dirty as hell..."
"If it bothers you, go drag Leviathan over and tell him to peel his name off for you."
Fuu scoffed the reply at Momomomo Chisa, who lay flopped flat on the sand, grumbling. There was, of course, no way Chisa could produce a great demon who had already been missing for ages, and even if by some miracle she managed it, the creature was hardly about to surrender its power. In the end the remark was nothing more, and nothing less, than a taunt.
Fuu loosened her muscles with a few easy stretches, then trudged over toward Han Seoyeon.
Ryuumai Fuu's swimsuit was the sort commonly called a rash guard. She was not a woman who worried about her skin burning, nor one who would be shy of baring her upper body, so the garment was almost certainly meant to hide the scars across her torso. One might ask why she didn't simply turn to modern medicine, or to the healing of a Church cleric—but in Fuu's case, this was already as far as treatment could go. Curse laid over curse, sorcery snarled with sorcery, she had been ruined past mending; she had called upon every kind of anomaly to patch her body back together, and in the end what lay inside her had half stepped beyond the human. It was the price of flinging herself, time and again, into killing grounds that even the denizens of the hidden world recoiled from—places they would not so much as piss toward.
"Hey, where'd the young lady go? And Miss Ninomae."
"If you mean Miss Yuri, she was watching the beach volleyball, then decided partway through that it was boring and took Hitomi out to sea."
One could call it irresponsible. It was Yuri herself who had brought the match up, and that was what had set the two of them playing beach volleyball in the first place. But Hyakurenno Yuri had always been a woman ruled by her moods, and even if she had never said a word, Chisa and Fuu would have found some way to fight. More than that, Yuri still had one foot in the realm of ordinary people; from where she stood, the rally had been something no eye could follow. To be made to keep watching a match she couldn't even properly understand would have been a considerable ordeal in its own right.
"Is that so. Ah—there they are."
In truth, Fuu didn't look particularly concerned either. Having just laid Chisa out flat, she would have been in a fairly good mood regardless. She crouched down beside Seoyeon, who had been sitting quietly.
"By the way, that eye... so the transplant really was impossible?"
"This? Yes. I gave it a try, but there was simply no way."
Among the scars left on Fuu even after every treatment that could be given—the ones already touched upon—that eye was the foremost. Lift the eyepatch, and beneath it would lie a cavity so deep its bottom could not be known. As with the rash guard, she kept it covered in daily life because she judged it a rather gruesome sight for others, though Seoyeon had once happened to see what lay underneath. Plenty of people flinched at the mere sight of Han Seoyeon. A part of the body likely to provoke a similar reaction was, all things considered, more comfortable for everyone if it stayed hidden.
"It was an eye the Rosicrucian Order secured, you said?"
"Yes. That's right. Did you donate it, as you mentioned before?"
"Ah, yes. I gave it to a civilian who got caught up in the old Onmyoryo civil war. The eye was snarled in a curse, so the other transplant surgeries were useless too."
"That's fortunate."
Fuu, who had just said as much, showed scarcely any lingering regret. Granted, if she could not use it herself, it was better that someone else should benefit—but that was only reason talking, and real feeling need not have agreed. Had she gone on hoping the eye might yet be restored, only to learn too late that it was impossible, would the disappointment not have been all the keener?
"Would it be all right if I asked what became of the Rosicrucians? It isn't classified, is it?"
"It's fine. I smashed them."
"Wooow. So laying a hand on your wife really was the critical hit."
That alone was enough. Fuu nodded as if the whole thing made sense.
"Every member was arrested, aside from a few who resisted too violently. The 'body' they had been refining was seized as well."
"All seven parts of the body—you used every one of them to heal other people, I take it?"
"Three of them."
At Fuu's question, Seoyeon had glanced up for a moment at the sun overhead before she answered.
"Three? Then the other four..."
"I used them to restore the body of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints."
"Huh. Now that you mention it, there was that bishop. Those Rosicrucian bastards really do something useful once in a while."
In truth, they were an organization that had, from time to time, offered up the fruits of their own research. They had not been wholly useless, which was precisely why the debate over whether to crush them had dragged on and on.
"Only..."
"Was there some kind of problem?"
"It seems, all things considered, that this incident had someone behind it."
Seoyeon frowned, just slightly, and went on.
"It's clear the man's motive was to uncover Sarah Groothuizen's so-called 'red pill.' Members of the Rosicrucians testified that he had been a fan of Sarah's for a long time. But I'm told that if it had only been a matter of Mary Tepes possessing information about her, he would never have bothered to move."
Even so, he had carried a plan like this into action because there had been another trigger.
"He said he received Mary's—that is, Hitomi's—personal information from someone. By his own testimony, he was the sort who would normally have left Mary's private life alone, but once he learned the address this way, it struck him as an opportunity, and he did it on impulse."
"Personal information? From who?"
"That part is unknown. He definitely received the information from someone... but he said he simply cannot remember who he got it from, or how."
"Did a ghost get into him, or something?"
"Who can say. In any case, I've been looking into that part on my own."
It was certainly something that needed investigating. The exact circumstances were still unknown, but at present the natural reading was that whoever had passed that information to the culprit—Himei Hidetaka—intended Hitomi harm. Whoever it had been, they could hardly have handed over information like that without anticipating how the man would act.
"There is one thing that does concern me, though."
"What's that?"
"I think, all things considered, that I'll need to hear Miss Natsugahara Hina's testimony."
"...Natsugahara Hina? The Natsugahara I know? Rokumondera Aki, the first-generation senpai?"
"Yes. That's right."
Han Seoyeon nodded.
"According to Hitomi, a threatening call came in. I looked into the number briefly, and it belonged to someone already dead."
"A call from a dead person's number... Did they use some faith tangled up with a ghost story, or an anomaly?"
"That is the assumption for now. The thing is, the number belonged to a colleague of Miss Natsugahara's."
"A colleague of Miss Natsugahara's... Ah."
In context, it certainly did not mean her present colleagues at Anathema Production. There were no dead among them to begin with. Which meant it was obvious whom the words "Hina's colleague" pointed to.
"Yes. An idol who belonged to Placeholder... who used to, that is."
The past tense was because she was already dead, and because she had died in a decidedly horrific way. Ask anyone to name the Vampire Syndrome incidents that had drawn the most attention, setting aside the Christmas Eve massacre, and the Placeholder Incident would never be left off the list. A catastrophe in which they had turned without warning, and colleagues had fallen upon one another in a slaughter. It was also the incident that had left Natsugahara Hina, the sole survivor at the time, with a severe phobia of other people.
"As things stand, I do believe Miss Natsugahara Hina's testimony would be helpful in a number of ways... but the subject being what it is, I've been reluctant to touch it carelessly."
She was already someone whose severe fear of people made testimony difficult to obtain, and this would strike directly at that trauma. Seoyeon couldn't help worrying whether a conversation would even proceed at all.
"For this, I don't think I'll have any choice but to ask the first-generation members for help. It would be better if someone she's opened her heart to, even a little, were there."
"Yeah. That much is true."
A light sigh slipped from Seoyeon. Seeing it, Ryuumai Fuu rose without hurry and patted the clinging sand from her backside.
"Well, that's a matter for later. It's not as if we can call Miss Natsugahara out here this very moment... For now, isn't it better to just relax and enjoy ourselves?"
"...Yes. You're right."
"Come on. Your wife's waiting. We're finally here—if Miss Ninomae can't properly enjoy herself because she's fretting over you, Shion, that's going to sit badly with her."
"Right?"
So saying, Fuu grinned.